Long before Donald Trump began to ramp up the demagoguery against immigrants with pledges to build a border wall to keep them out, there was a hotel in the north of Mexico that sheltered only those deported from the United States and those seeking to cross the border to find their “American Dream.”
It is called the Migrant Hotel and it is located in Mexicali, a border city across from southern California on the US side.
“Deported migrants are the forgotten ones of the system,” says the director of the Angels without Borders organisation, Sergio Tamai, a shopkeeper who ventured into social activism several years ago during the so-called “deportee crisis.”
The 50-room property, operated by his organisation, was built in the 1930s. It is located just a few metres from the border crossing.
It had been abandoned for decades until the Angels without Borders organisation turned it into a shelter for Mexican migrants who were expelled from the United States and who had nowhere to go.
There is room for 600 people. Due to high demand, 150 camping tents have been installed on the roof to accommodate more migrants, but this area is closed down during winter.
The hotel’s management fears the situation will become even more desperate now that the Trump administration has embarked upon a programme of rounding up undocumented workers in the United States and summarily deporting them.
In 2009, more than 600,000 migrants were deported from the United States to Mexico. Tamai saw these deportees arriving in Mexicali disoriented, hungry and with nowhere to turn.
“I couldn’t believe that these people were not getting any kind of support from the government, since they’ve sent back so much money to Mexico,” he said, speaking of the 21 billion dollars in total remittances that Mexican migrants sent home in 2009 alone.
The hotel opened in January 2010. It had no beds, no water, no electricity. Its services were basic: a spot to sleep in and a blanket for warmth. “It was still better than sleeping in the streets,” says its founder. “Here you didn’t have to worry about being assaulted or arrested by the police.”
Neglect had ruined the building, one of the oldest and most historic in Mexicali.
During the 1940s – the boom time for the production of cotton in Mexicali – it was called the Hotel Centenario and hosted tycoons attracted by the so-called “white-gold rush.”
“The really rich stayed here, foreign magnates who came for business,” says Tamai, whose Japanese grandparents came to Mexicali at the beginning of the last century.
The Angels without Borders initiative was supported by civil society with donations of food, clothing and blankets. Over the years the conditions and capacity of the hotel have improved.
The organisation has also succeeded in undertaking productive projects to reduce its dependency on donations, while at the same time providing food services to migrants at affordable prices. An Internet cafe and a low-cost food restaurant operate from the ground floor of the building.
In the kitchen is Jesus Ramirez, who lived for 45 years in Los Angeles, California, before being deported to Mexicali. For now, he lives in the hotel and works as a cook, a skill he learnt in the United States.
“I don’t want to go back [to the United States]. I’m here while I save a little money and set myself up in the city,” he says while cooking up a plate of meat and potatoes.
In the kitchen with Ramirez is Hade, one of the roughly 3,000 Haitian migrants that come to Mexicali yearly fleeing the poverty that has been aggravated by the strong earthquake that rocked that nation in 2010.
Hade lives in the hotel and works as a cook while she waits for an appointment from the US immigration authorities to request asylum. “I want to go there because I want a better life for my family,” she says.
For the migration specialist Jose Moreno of the Migrant Pro Defense Coalition, the current situation for Mexicali’s shelters is difficult, since there is not enough room to meet the demands of the scores of would-be migrants who come into the city each day.
However, his greatest fear is Trump’s massive deportation programme that is just getting started. “We’re not prepared, not the government, not the organisations, nobody,” he warns.
Tamai says it is clear that there will be “a serious problem” in the future. The Migrant Hotel does not have the capacity to address the humanitarian crisis that could arrive at its doors.
Another major problem, he says, is that some of those being deported to Mexicali are coming straight from US prisons. “Many of them are criminals or gang members, but when all is said and done, they are Mexicans and our brothers, and we have to take them in.” – DPA


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